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Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS

By | March 3, 2011, 3:20am PST

Summary: Seagate new Barracuda XT isn’t the first internal hard drive to reach the 3TB plateau, but it does make it easier to access all of that storage if you are still using Windows XP or have a system with a PC BIOS controller. The problem for those with such legacy technology is that they don’t natively [...]

Seagate new Barracuda XT isn’t the first internal hard drive to reach the 3TB plateau, but it does make it easier to access all of that storage if you are still using Windows XP or have a system with a PC BIOS controller.

The problem for those with such legacy technology is that they don’t natively support storage beyond 2.1TB, which means there’s little purpose to buying a 3TB drive if you’re losing almost a third of that capacity. Seagate has devised a software workaround in the latest version of its DiscWizard utility to let XP and/or PC BIOS desktops access the full 3 terabytes. Essentially, DiscWizard sets up a device driver that it manages (not Windows) for the drive’s storage above 2.1TB.

If you have a newer desktop with a UEFI BIOS controller (and Windows Vista or Windows 7), it can handle 3TB natively, but Seagate has you covered, too. It spins at 7,200rpm, features a 64MB cache, and makes use of the Serial ATA 6Gb/s interface.

Online retailer Provantage.com is showing the drive for a shade under $270, which isn’t cheap, but they’ll be some out there willing to pay for that massive amount of storage.

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Hard Drive, PC, Internal Hard Drive, Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows, Seagate Technology LLC, Sean Portnoy

Sean Portnoy is a freelance technology journalist.

Disclosure

Sean Portnoy

Sean Portnoy is a freelance technology journalist; currently, all work that Sean does is on a contractural basis. Sean has also written corporate communications documents for CA.

Sean does not accept gifts from companies he covers. All hardware products he writes about are purchased with his own funds or are review units covered under formal loan agreements and are returned after the review is complete.

Biography

Sean Portnoy

Sean Portnoy started his tech writing career at ZDNet nearly a decade ago. He then spent several years as an editor at Computer Shopper magazine, most recently serving as online executive editor. He received a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. from the University of Southern California.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
opcom 6th Apr 2011
I like this. It would be even cooler to have something that would retrofit back to PC/XT/AT where the HDD controller was on a card. MFM forever! - seriously that might be a waste, but I have a few old green military field computers with the 16 bit bus and it is impossible to find IDE or other HDD for them - -naturally the one part that Uncle Sam removed before surplusing.

To more recent PCs - the 8 year old XP machine can't deal with HDD over 100GB or so, and that is an issue as it's used for storage backup and USB 1.0 is too sloooow.. Would this thing even work in there?
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Nice.. but....
Hallowed are the Ori 3rd Mar 2011
I seem to recall reading somewhere that the larger the capacity of the drive, the greater the risk of data corruption and loss, be it silent or otherwise.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
RyuDarragh 3rd Mar 2011
@Hallowed are the Ori: Data corruption, silent or otherwise, happens to all storage media and can be protected against by running scans periodically for corrupted files and always backing up onto either another drive or tape, etc.

The odds of such corruption are per area and density, not precisely to total data capacity, and apply to all drives. So, yes, larger capacity drives compared to the same technology used in lower capacity drives will suffer from this proportionally.

However, most drives have much more than the reported capacity to not only handle drive overhead (sync, checksums, etc..) but to combat this creeping crud using higher level ECC techniques. So, even though more "corrosion" may occur, stronger remedies are applied.
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Thanks
Hallowed are the Ori 3rd Mar 2011
@RyuDarragh

I see. Thanks for the info. happy
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
compcentral2 3rd Mar 2011
Since you can buy three 2TB drives and put them in a RAID-5 array for less money, I think that makes more sense.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
cgarrett 3rd Mar 2011
@compcentral2 With drives that large, I'd rather do RAID-6 or RAID-1. Rebuild times are too high to not expect a failure on RAID 5.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
tom@... 3rd Mar 2011
@cgarrett ... ... But, but ... RAID 1 isn't going to do you any good as far as I can see that way. Plus they're internal drives.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
sdghjyky 3rd Mar 2011
http://in2s.us/1z8
http://in2s.us/1z8
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Spammer
Hallowed are the Ori 3rd Mar 2011
@sdghjyky

F**king spammers.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
bc3tech Updated - 3rd Mar 2011
Wow... brings back memories of Western Digital and Maxtor's tools way back in the day to allow you to use your 2gb drive on your PC

I'll wait until they fix the BIOSes
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
RyuDarragh 3rd Mar 2011
@bc3tech: They already have. If you have a Flash based BIOS (which includes the UEFI type), you can get an upgrade for this. If you don't, or get a mobo that doesn't have a flash BIOS/UEFI, then you're SOL unless you use the tool offered.
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Have had no luck with Seagate
bobiroc 3rd Mar 2011
These past few years I have had nothing but bad luck with Seagate drives above 500GB. My school district keeps buying them and they keep failing. We have them up to 1.5TB.

Also in my side work I have seen more seagate drives failed in the past few years than any other brand. I have kind of lost confidence in them to be honest.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
Hasam1991 3rd Mar 2011
@bobiroc
I agree, WD is my preferred brand, even Hitachi have been good lately and cheap.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
VRSpock 3rd Mar 2011
@bobiroc
I've got 2 Seagate 1.5 Barracudas. One has worked flawlessly for about a year. The other was DOA when I bought it and it took me about a year to get around to RMA it. Thankfully in that amount of time, I have not had a single problem with the first one....the second was intended to mirror the first.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
RyuDarragh 3rd Mar 2011
@bobiroc: Heh. Only the "Barracuda (Seagate)/Caviar (WD)" brands seem to have the fail mode for me. Especially back with the 2GB Caviar from WD. Other than that, have never had a drive go bad from Seagate, WD or Maxtor and that's from 10MB all the way to 2TB and most get used for a minimum of 2-5 Years. Hey! It was always the FISH themed drives that gave me trouble and did the CLACK/SPUNG of death! Hmmmm...
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
bobiroc 3rd Mar 2011
@RyuDarragh

In terms of luck I have had the best luck with WD. I do know that in some model/sizes of Seagate drives there was an issue that I believe a firmware update was released for. Mainly their 1TB drives but I think it affected the 750MB and the 1.5TB ones as well.

My district bought a whole bunch of them (like 50 or so) in 1TB size to build some cheap NAS storage and we literally have had at least 30 - 40% of them fail. That is how I came across the firmware. I applied the firmware and even then some have failed since. They were under warranty so we got them replaced and two of the warriantied ones failed within a couple months.

I then built the same type of NAS device using WD Black drives and that has been going good for a little over a year (knock on wood)
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You're lucky then with Seagate
klumper Updated - 5th Mar 2011
@RyuDarragh

I could point out a number of Seagate fumbles spanning back thru the years, the latest of which was the Barracuda 7200.11 series plus the Barracuda ES.2 and DiamondMax 22 that affected various models from 500GB to 1.5TB. Actually over 20 different Seagate drives were earmarked for treatment. It was a firmware flaw causing data on the drive to become inaccessible after power-on.

If you were the unfortunate recipient of this bug, you were left with no choice but to ship the HDD to Seagate for flash repair and data recovery (per i365 DR) or replacement. They also released preemptive DIY flash firmware which caused additional drives to brick, causing them to yank it from their support site, before offering a new and improved release.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
search & destroy 3rd Mar 2011
@klumper

That's the worst horror story I've read since the days of Maxtor bricks and IBM Deathstars going south back in the early 2000s

Sad for Seagate, once one of the leaders of quality HDDs
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Sad indeed
klumper Updated - 5th Mar 2011
@search & destroy
Sad for Seagate, once one of the leaders of quality HDDs.

All the big makers have had their share of gaffes, you pointed out a few other well known ones. Seagate had been on a roll in recent years until this setback. I move lots of drives and can tell you first hand the level of support I received from this far-reaching blunder was anything but sterling.

I also didn't appreciate the percentage of drives that were declared to be "unfixable" per in-house flash overwrites. That of course left you (or your perspective client) with the option of using their data recovery arm, at your expense. Beyond that, they replaced the defective units with ones "they" deemed equivalent or superior in specs, when sometimes they were not.

I finally had enough and contacted their corporate office. After a number of calls and written correspondences, I was assured their support incident SOPs were going to change. Whether this panned out as promised I don't know, but I do know my own i365 tickets went much smoother thereafter.

Like you said, sad for Seagate, once the industry leader.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
mjbernier 3rd Mar 2011
When I started shopping for an upgrade, I found the new Hitachi 2TB 7K3000 drive was actually selling at a better price point than their own 3TB drive (which also lists for less than this Seagate 3TB), so I went with it instead. I've been using Hitachi for years and never had an issue with one.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
dhays 3rd Mar 2011
Reminds me of when I paid $250 for a 250M drive a few years ago, and it replaced a 40 M drive. So with cheaper dollars and much, much more storage, it doesn't look bad. I'm sure you can do better as one responder said. I am still running XP, at least until the OEM disk drive dies. At that time I will probably upgrade to a new PC. Who knows what will be available then? W8?
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
jmwells21 3rd Mar 2011
Why are people still dead-set on using WinXP? Were people still expecting the latest software & hardware to be compatible with their Commodore 128 back in 1995? XP is DEAD, people! I know the herd doesn't like change, but it's time to move on.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
davidmpaul 3rd Mar 2011
@jmwells21
WHY? If it works for you just go with it, just remember that you might not get replacement parts. It just like some people like (or must for economical reason) drive older cars.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
VRSpock 3rd Mar 2011
@jmwells21
What? You mean I can't use a 3TB Hard Drive on my Commodore 128?!?!?!?!
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
tom@... 3rd Mar 2011
@jmwells21 ... Why? Because XP offers me EXACTLY what I need, everything I want, and Vista/win7 are just beginning their SP x deliveries. Why start over like that when I already have an OS that is stable, trustworthy, Secure (whish is easy to get set up), has no problems with backward compatability, and still offeres more than I need at XP Pro SP3+? If any of the others offered me any substantial or, actually just any improvements/additions I want or needed, I'd consider them. But they don't. And neither does my win98 which is running as a server and hardware firewall in addition to the NAT router firewall with another layer of software firewall sitting against that.
I do repairs for people with Vista and win 7 and so have learned a bit about them, so my experience is not only from reading. This particular machine came with full sets of disks for both XP Pro and win 7; I have them preinstall XP for me. If/when MS pulls their forced obsoletion move, I'll just add more RAM in the provided sockets and install win 7 for near future plans. A LOT of people are still using XP Pro.
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
RyuDarragh 3rd Mar 2011
@jmwells21: I'm in favor of taking a HUGE leap backwards and getting rid of a HUGE range of bells and whistles in all of my apps that I never use, so sticking with the stable, usable and less bloated XP is Ok with me. I don't need or want RPC. I don't want scripting in PDF documents (favored malware delivery system now, it seems). XP is so close to a perfect "just does enough right" operating system, I and a large contingent of folks, would love to see it polished and cleaned up and be satisfied with one that doesn't support the latest iBJ technology, but does 99.99999% of what I want (I leave it to you to parse that last acronym).
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3 TB Internal drives
tom@... 3rd Mar 2011
-- OK, if you want that internal. Personally I only use terabyte drives as externals where it's easy to isolate them from the system.

-- Glad to see it plays nicely with XP but I can't at the moment envision anything I do where the trhee 1 terabyte external drves I have wouldn't suffice.

-- IMO it's just too risky to have terabyte drives at that kind of price internally mounted where they are susceptible to all of the headaches all the other drives are subject to.

-- After experiencing 1K rpm on my internals any future drives will have to work at 10k also. That doesn't sound like 10k should be much of a jump from 7200, but it really is.

-- besides, XP SP3 support will last until 2014 so the only thing can happen to XP is it will continue to be way ahead of the newer ones in bugs & necessary work-arounds.

Those are my basic reasons; there are a lot more but listing them all would make too long a post.
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Oh that's so last century
cwallen19803@... 4th Mar 2011
Why wouldn't you just partition the drive to within the OS limits like we used to do in the last century?
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iomega tried to do it too...
crcgraphix 5th Mar 2011
After the release of the WD (Western Digital) GreenLeaf, and yes it's hard to find now, Iomega tried to come out with the same type of thing. Only smaller and for a external HDD unit. I think that unless the hard drive co's put their heads together , they are going to fail miserably on this one. How about a 2.5 tb drive, or a 2640 or something...?
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RE: Seagate ships 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive that plays nice with Windows XP, PC BIOS
opcom 6th Apr 2011
I like this. It would be even cooler to have something that would retrofit back to PC/XT/AT where the HDD controller was on a card. MFM forever! - seriously that might be a waste, but I have a few old green military field computers with the 16 bit bus and it is impossible to find IDE or other HDD for them - -naturally the one part that Uncle Sam removed before surplusing.

To more recent PCs - the 8 year old XP machine can't deal with HDD over 100GB or so, and that is an issue as it's used for storage backup and USB 1.0 is too sloooow.. Would this thing even work in there?

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